Walter Williams High School students and the Center for Design Thinking facilitators unite over The American Queen, connecting history to home.
Alamance Reads and Power+Place Collaborative, in collaboration with Walter Williams High School, brings students together through a shared reading experience each year. This year’s selected book, “The American Queen,” serves as a tool to spark discussion, reflection and deeper understanding of history and community.
As part of the program, students at Walter Williams High School read The American Queen alongside Elon University’s Center for Design Thinking and Power+Place Storytellers. Every Tuesday, the Center for Design Thinking’s Danielle Lake and student facilitators Cooper Mallor, Berenice Sanchez-Rosaldo and Tyberious Brooks facilitated discussions at these sessions.
During the discussions, the Center has been focusing on the leadership strategies and transformative actions related to the themes of oppression throughout the book. Additionally, the Center encourages students to reflect on the book’s overall content, themes and connections to real-world issues.
“Every time I go, I feel pretty excited,” Brooks said. “Getting to see them open up more, think more critically about what they’re reading, it’s really nice to see the progression in them every time we go.”
To further increase real-world connections, over eight Power+Place Storytellers and various community partners joined the weekly sessions. The goal of their participation was to offer engaging mentorship figures for students. Each individual comes to the program with a background that allows them to understand each other’s experiences and themselves in similar terms.
“‘The American Queen’ fits naturally in his core curriculum, which challenges students to examine resistance against discrimination throughout U.S. history,” said Robert Alvis, a civil literacy teacher at Walter Williams High School. “This core curriculum goal closely aligns with the Center’s goal to empower students to act as leaders in the face of oppression.”
Alvis says he hopes students “learn how to listen to someone’s opinion and respond to constructive questions” from these discussions.
Set during the Reconstruction Era, “The American Queen” focuses on the quality of life Black people had as a result of their own leadership and decisions after slavery was abolished. The book explores the complexity of freedom as something communities had to define for themselves amid ongoing hardships.
“It’s not like one day the government woke up and said slavery is abolished and everything is better now,” Alvis said.
Made possible by a $20,000 grant awarded to the Power+Place Collaborative and The Center for Design Thinking by the North Carolina Humanities, Walter Williams High School Students, Center facilitators, Power+Place storytellers, and community partners were able to bring conversations about the book beyond the classroom.
The “Storying Home: Cultivating Cross-Cultural Connections through Storytelling” grant, which was awarded, aims to support civic storytelling to encourage conversations surrounding generational and cultural background differences. Through it, the book program culminated in a meaningful milestone — an opportunity to meet the author of “The American Queen” in person and engage with the wider Alamance County community at a book luncheon on April 15.